US supreme court rejects appeal from lawyer punished over effort to remove abusive priest

The US supreme court has rejected an appeal from an attorney who was fined $400,000 after taking steps to get an abusive Roman Catholic priest removed as chaplain of a high school campus. In a notice on Monday, the supreme court’s justices indicated without explanation that they would not take up the case of Richard Trahant, whose clients include dozens of people victimized by a clergy abuse scandal that drove New Orleans’ Catholic archdiocese into federal bankruptcy court. Monday’s ruling all but closed the book on one of the most contentious chapters of that bankruptcy protection case, which the New Orleans archdiocese filed in 2020. Trahant’s work on the archdiocesan bankruptcy positioned him to learn that a New Orleans priest named Paul Hart had secretly admitted to his religious superiors that he had sexual contact with a 17-year-old girl in the early 1990s after meeting her through his duties as a clergyman. Hart was reported in 2012 to the church for that behavior and confessed to it during a confidential internal investigation, according to hundreds of legal documents previously reviewed by the Guardian. State law applicable in New Orleans sets the legal age of sexual consent at 17. The US’s Catholic bishops, nonetheless, had made 18 the age of consent under canon – or church – law in 2002. …